I’m sitting in the small Grant Aviation terminal in Bethel, biding time until my flight to Quinhagak is organized and ready to depart.  I’m traveling with friend and photographer Dusan Smetana, who now makes his home in Montana but who was raised in the former Czechoslovakia, where he chased after red deer and trout with his father before escaping the Communist regime for a new life in the United States. He rarely talks about those Eastern European days, but today he’s intrigued by memory, and by the involuntary nature of it all.

This kind of conversation may seem unexpected; after all, we’re less than a half-hour from enjoying the reality of prismatic, cone-headed streamers and bright, ocean-fresh coho, so one might expect a little fish or fly to be present in the dialogue. Instead we’re talking language, history, and their convergence.

“Even now, hearing the German language spoken brings immediate anger,” Dusan tells me. I learn that this is because, as a child in the local schools, he and the other students were regularly subjected to hours of World War II movies featuring all the predictable Nazi atrocities. Hearing Russian, however, brings only feelings of a certain kind of nostalgia—happiness and warmth, a longing for those simpler days of childhood. He does understand the irony of this situation, though. “It should be the other way around, you’d think. The Russians occupied us for 40 years, the Germans for five.”

We talk like this for some time, until our small wheel-plane is ready in fact, and then the conversation is stopped only by the whine of engines and the unfolding panorama of water-crossed tundra below. By the time we disembark, there’s no time for chitchat, not with rods to string up, knots to manufacture, flies to choose. There’s half a day left, and in southwest Alaska, half a day can mean a lot of coho.

In waders and light fleece, Dusan and I are soon walking from our tent to the jetboat waiting at the river’s edge, now thinking only of decent casts, solid setups and hefty, chrome-sided silvers at the end of it all.

“Tekituten,” a sign on the wall at Grant Aviation reads. You have arrived.

Angling in Alaska can often be this abrupt, traveling from the height of modern civilization to utter wilderness in the blink of an eye. However, as my week with Dusan progresses, I come to realize it’s not the sharpness of this environmental separation that interests me so greatly, but rather the connections fishing helps us to make. Simply put, I wouldn’t know Dusan or any of a dozen other good friends if I didn’t fish. I wouldn’t know much about the Yup’ik, their lands or their way of life; I wouldn’t have seen the sun set on four different continents, or thousands of other remarkable sights that seem pretty indispensible when I look back on where I’ve been and what I’ve done. Thinking about these things—what I might have missed were I to have never learned how to properly tie an improved clinch or wake a Pollywog across a river’s surface—makes me both appreciate a youth spent on the water, and like Dusan’s wistfulness for Russian, miss it. For one thing, I’d have paid more attention to everything but the fish if I’d have known how little a twelve-inch trout caught on my tenth birthday would matter twenty-five years down the road.

As it is, thanks to a number of family members and friends through the years, I can fish, and I like to fish, and so I choose a purple-and-fuchsia mix from a fly box overflowing with color and I start to strip out line. Dusan, whose father taught him to cast in the clear streams of the Carpathian Mountains, hooks and lands a solid silver after just one swing of an Egg-sucking Leech. Ten minutes later he’s off the water, photographing flowers peeking out from behind the streamside alder, then a bear. He comes back a bit later and is immediately into salmon again; these fish hammer the fly, race across- and downriver at breakneck speed, jump, flip and cartwheel all over the place, and generally make themselves seem like the greatest sport on Earth. In the distance, the fading sun is starting to paint the western horizon with about thirty shades of pink.